Welcome back to this week’s edition of 2-Minute Tuesdays where we are talking about one exercise topic for two minutes and giving you three reasons why you should follow our advice. Now this week, we are talking to those of you who are high school athletes. How should you be working out now at this point in your life to make sure your body gets stronger while staying safe and injury-free as well?
1) Start Balancing Out Your Workouts
Exercise tip number one for high school athletes – start balancing out your workouts. The likelihood is that if you are a high school athlete, you are doing a lot of sport-specific workouts with your team. Make sure you are finding the areas of your body that are not being worked as much with your team and give those areas extra attention.
Action Step: If you are a high school athlete, you are probably wanting to perform well in your sport. While sport-specific training can be a part of that, staying injury free is equally if not more important. Make sure you are not developing muscle imbalances with your sport-specific training by including some extra exercises targeted at strengthening the areas that may otherwise get missed.
Related: Exercising For Your Health vs. Exercising For Sport
2) Lift With Control
Exercise tip number two for high school athletes – make sure you are lifting with control. Across the board, the common theme we see with high school athletes is they are trying to move as much weight as possible, and they end up moving as fast as possible. Here’s the thing – the more weight you are using and the faster you are moving that weight, the more likely you are to injure yourself. If you are going to use a lot of weight, you have to make sure to move it slowly.
Action Step: Try implementing a 4:1:4:1 tempo – four seconds up, one second pause, four seconds down, one second pause. This will help to ensure that even if you are lifting heavier weights, you are doing so with control.
Related: How To Build Muslce Without Tearing Up Your Joints
3) Take Care Of Your Injuries Right Away
Exercise tip number three for high school athletes – when you get injured, make sure to take care of it right away. These injuries, if they are not taken care of, are the things that compound and live in your body and then show up again when you are 40 or 50. It is important to make sure that if you get injured or your overwork an area, you allow your body to recover from this injury and get the treatment you need so you can get back to playing as soon as possible.
Action Step: Listen to your body. When you are 15-18 years old, your body recovers pretty quickly as is. However, if you notice that you are not recovering as well as you would have hoped or you are feeling more beat up than usual, listen to your body and take some extra time to help it recover.
